Small Things
by Tandrelmairon
Summary: A filler set a few weeks after the movie, when Logan's returned from his factfinding trip.


(Disclaimer: I didn't make them and I don't own them.)  
  
"Logan?" She was whispering so softly even he could barely hear it, especially over the rain. "Are you awake?"  
  
"Yeah, kid. Come on in." His own voice sounded loud in comparison. He heard the door open slowly and she looked around the corner into his room, her dark eyes shining in the lamplight. "Once bitten, twice shy, huh?" he said wryly.  
  
She smiled and pushed the white lock back behind her ear, coming forward. "I'm just trying some common courtesy." She stopped at the edge of the bed and looked around. He watched her silently take in his rearrangements to the room for several seconds. She looked back at him. "It looks cozy."  
  
Logan snorted. He looked at his watch. It was after three. "Why aren't you asleep?"  
  
Marie hesitated. "I couldn't. I've been trying." She was silent for a moment. "But if you're busy..."  
  
"No." He laid one hand down beside him on the navy bedspread. It still felt strange, sitting on a mattress. "Come here."  
  
She clambered onto the bed and he felt the mattress bounce a bit as she sat against the headrest beside him, cross-legged. Through the cigar smoke he smelled her shampoo, the leather from her gloves and, of all things, diesel. Was motorcycle maintenance part of the school curriculum? He reached forward for one of the pillows he had kicked down to his feet and handed it to her to lean against.  
  
She set it behind her and settled back on it, and he held the map so she could see the path he'd taken on his latest fruitless trip. "So I was here," he said, pointing to the base site just north of Tripson. "And then here," moving east to make a small circle round the nameless spot in the Alaskan badlands where the homestead had been.  
  
Marie nodded. "I was going to pass less than thirty miles west of Tripson, through Skokie."  
  
"Yeah. I've been through there forty times. Who'd have thought it, huh." Going in circles for fifteen years, he thought. Most of this kid's life. But is that a long time, when every year is the same as the one before? "But no cage fights or poker games on this trip." And bitter cold, driving a hundred miles an hour most of the day in twenty below freezing. Frostbite wasn't dangerous for him, but it wasn't pleasant.  
  
She laughed. "You play poker?"  
  
"Yeah." Not for fun, and certainly not for companionship. It had been a major source of income when he wasn't fighting.  
  
She turned herself round to sit facing him and looked at him silently. Logan watched her eyes move over his face. "Do you think you'll be able to find the next piece of the whole thing?" Since everyone who could have helped you has so neatly disappeared, she didn't need to add.  
  
At that thought he felt the old outrage, simmering for months now, threaten to break out all over again. "I'd settle for finding the unprintables who covered it up," he growled, dropping the map and looking away.  
  
She was silent for a little while. "A weapon it hurts you to use," she said softly. Logan looked back and followed her eyes down to glance at his hands. They were clasped together, one rubbing the bony knuckles of the other, the fingers tracing the oval edges of the claw sheaths. He opened his hands, and held them up, palms down, studying them as if he'd never seen them before.  
  
"That's always bothered me," she said, looking at them too, as if all the answers were hidden somewhere in there. "But how else could you keep them really hidden? I can never think of any other way."  
  
Logan looked up at her and smiled a little, imagining her putting her insomnia to good use for the last three months thinking of different ways to redesign him. His anger melted back down where it had come from. "Yeah," he agreed. "And then why was that so important?"  
  
"And I can think of so many reasons...so, which?"  
  
"If it was even that specific."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Right." He had been down that train of thought, but it never seemed to go any farther. "That's where it is. I don't know. I need to think." And for now, he didn't want to. He was tired of it. For the first time, in the lamplight, he noticed her skin was darker now than when he'd left. She'd probably been soaking up the sun every chance she got, now that she was more than fifty miles from the Arctic Circle. "What have you been up to since I left, kid?"  
  
Marie clasped her arms round her knees and rocked back a bit. "School, mostly. That's a strange thing, isn't it?"  
  
He chuckled.  
  
"Most of it's the same things I've always studied. Of course some of it isn't." She held out her own hands in front of her, in unconscious imitation of him. "Of course I've been trying to learn to...you know..."  
  
He nodded. All the pains in his room tonight were old and well worn; their moods and contours were familiar. They were at an ebb, just now; there were only the memory and anticipation of them. Marie was looking down at her lap, but he watched her face, his body feeling almost like it was tensing for battle. Who was there to be angry at for her sake?  
  
"Any luck yet?" Of course from the way she was acting, he knew the answer.  
  
She shook her head and shrugged, looking down at the bed. She picked at some seam with fingers made clumsy by the gloves, shining dull black against the faded blue of the bedspread.  
  
After a moment, as if it too were a familiar thing and not something he'd done once in his life, he reached over and gathered her to him. One hand wrapped round her far shoulder and the other guided her head to his chest, safely below his collar.  
  
Marie leaned against him, her face turned towards the window. She put one arm round his chest.  
  
"I'm so sorry, Logan," she said quietly. "I don't know what it's like to have my past cut off like that. But I've been thinking about it. I would feel like I didn't know myself."  
  
He sighed. "Or maybe I'm making it more than it is. I don't know. But you...you've just started trying. You've got years."  
  
"Yeah," she said. "Let's not think about it now."  
  
Logan smiled. He let go, and she sat up and tucked her hair back behind her ears. "All right. Tell me about school."  
  
So she told him about the strangeness of being expected to keep a curfew after spending eight months hitchhiking, about getting used to reading again and loving literature and turning out to be good at higher math. The other students were mostly welcoming; they were used to new faces and most knew what it was like to feel strange and alone. They were kind. But none of them had spent nearly a year learning they really could get hungry and have nothing around to eat, and that strangers came in all kinds.  
  
Logan listened with growing bemusement. He had become the willing emotional confidante of a seventeen-year-old girl. And not about the things girls her age were thinking about. But what did he know of high school girls? Snatches of sitcoms from televisions in bars. Boys and rivalries and clothes and minor moral dilemmas and trouble with parents. Emotional, undamaged, pretty creatures who were somehow the same species as the rare weather-beaten grim-faced women who took drink orders and ran general stores in the backwaters of Alaska. If they were really that way, how would this solemn-eyed woman-child, who was yet something different, be among them?  
  
"Not," she added, chuckling, "that I want anyone to hitchhike for the right to be my friend. Just I think it'll take me longer to get to know them. And it's hard for us to find things to talk about." She yawned.  
  
Good. She might be lonely, but she was talking as if she still intended to stay. He almost asked her, and then decided not to bring up anything else that was heavy that night. She wouldn't leave while he was there anyway. And tomorrow he could look in on her classes and see for himself how it was going.  
  
"Yeah. I'm sure."  
  
She sat back against the headrest again and they sat there in silence for a while. This was more talking than he'd done in weeks. Months. More than most of the conversations he'd ever had.  
  
The rain was coming down harder; drops of water gleamed as they trickled down the window and his night vision could pick out the branches lashing in the wind outside. Several nights in the last two weeks he had listened to that sound from a tent, feeling the canvas shivering around him. Glad I got in tonight, he thought.  
  
After a while he looked over at her, and sure enough, her chin was down on her chest and her eyes were closed. A moment later she looked up. "Hmm?"  
  
"Go to bed, kid."  
  
Marie shook her head. "I'm not tired."  
  
"You fell asleep the minute you stopped talking."  
  
"I wasn't asleep." She fought valiantly against smiling and lost. "Not very asleep."  
  
Logan snorted.  
  
They were silent for a moment. He looked out the window again, wondering if, at a time like this, he was supposed to say something or anything. It was so strange to him, having her there, looking only for his company. He half-felt he knew how to give it and half-felt anything he did he might somehow ruin it.  
  
"How about a few games of poker?" she said.  
  
"You play poker?"  
  
She laughed and turned round to sit facing him again. "I passed through Las Vegas on my way north. I mean, they wouldn't let me into the casinos -"  
  
"- damn straight - "  
  
" - but I learned it from a couple of ten-year-olds in a diner."  
  
Logan reached for his jacket on the nightstand. "You're about to learn it from a pro." He fished out the box, tipped the cards out into his hand and started to deal.  
  
She reached over and took the deck from his hands. "They were pros. Why don't I just shuffle that first?"  
  
Twenty minutes later, he was fifteen matchsticks up. She had a pretty good poker face, and he didn't know her expressions yet, but like everyone else alive she sweated a bit more every time she was happy with her hand. And, lying on her stomach facing him with her legs kicking over the side of the bed, she was falling asleep.  
  
Finally he set his hand down. "Kid, you'll be a wreck in the morning. Go on and get to bed."  
  
"I'm not sleepy," she said quickly. "Ten more minutes."  
  
"In ten more minutes, I won't be able to wake you up. Go on." Then he noticed there was real worry in her dark eyes. He stopped, surprised, looking at her. "What...?"  
  
Then he understood. He leaned down on his hands and looked her in the eye. "Go ahead," he said, more gently. "I'll be here in the morning."  
  
Marie smiled a bit, but her look was solemn. "You promise?"  
  
"Yeah. I promise."  
  
She smiled for real and stood up off the bed, a little unsteadily. "Okay. Goodnight."  
  
He gathered up the cards. She would have won the last hand. He looked up at her. "Goodnight, kid."  
  
She turned and he watched her go round the corner and heard the door close. He sat there for a while, hands behind his head, looking out the window. Then he reached over and turned out the light. 


End file.
